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NHL players vote for mandatory visors, hybrid icing

New York Rangers' Marc Staal is helped by a trainer after being injured during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday, March 5, 2013, in New York. (Frank Franklin II / The Associated Press)

With the number of eye injuries on the rise and evidence of the dangers of head injuries mounting, NHL players have finally decided to make visors mandatory.

Starting next season, players coming into the league, as well as those who have played 25 or fewer NHL games, will be required to wear a visor for the rest of their careers if the NHL board of governors agrees to the recommendation made Tuesday by the league’s competition committee.

“If we hadn’t learned so much about brain injuries the last decade, we might not be having this conversation,” said Mathieu Schneider, a retired defenceman who now works for the NHL Players’ Association as a special assistant and who announced the proposed change following a secret vote.

“We accomplished an awful lot,” said Schneider. “We were able to get consensus. It’s the first time since we’ve been polling players that we’ve had a clear majority that have wanted it grandfathered in.”

Among other measures recommended by the competition committee:

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VIDEO REVIEW

Make it mandatory that a four-minute high-sticking call will be sent to video review to make sure the correct call was made.

HYBRID ICING

The race to an iced puck will now be a race to an imaginary line between the faceoff dots on either side of the goalie. It will start as a pre-season experiment, but the players promise to deliver a consensus recommendation on it in time for the start of the season.

EQUIPMENT

An equipment subcommittee will look at the sizes of all equipment, for both goalies and players. There seems to be a concern that equipment changes are making it too easy for players to block shots, thus reducing offence. Schneider likened it to a third baseman wearing catcher’s gear.

ICING

Stricter icing calls will be enforced, meaning the puck has to touch a player’s stick in order for icing to be waived off, instead of the current rule that allows for icing to be called off if the linesman judges the play was an attainable pass and simply not touched.

NETS

Shallower nets to give more room to skaters beside and behind the net. The bubbles that are now a feature beside the net will vanish, slicing four inches off the sides. The four-foot-by-six-foot net entrance will remain the same.

“The purpose is more room to work behind the net, more room to come out and do the jam play, hoping to produce more offence again,” said NHL senior vice-president Colin Campbell. “We’ve had this net ready for three or four years. We’ve used it at the research and development camp.

“We don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. Our best guess is it’s going to be better, it’s not going to be worse.”

Some issues must still be worked out, including the size of the visor. A penalty against starting a fight while wearing a visor needs to be rewritten. The nets still need to be manufactured, and other leagues may adopt them as well. The league also needs to come up with enforceable fines or suspensions for goalies wearing illegal pads.

“We have to walk through some of the specifics,” said Campbell. “We hope to really apply some teeth to the goaltender situation now.”

A number of NHL players have sustained eye injuries, most recently New York Rangers defenceman Marc Staal, Philadelphia Flyers defenceman Chris Pronger and former Maple Leafs defenceman Bryan Berard.

“Every time there’s an injury like that, any player without a visor starts to think about it, or has his mom call him, or his kids tell him or his wife,” said Schneider. “More guys put a visor on after the Staal injury.”

Eventually, all players will wear visors. Helmets were the last piece of equipment to be grandfathered in. They became mandatory for any player new to the league in 1979. The last helmetless player was current Edmonton Oilers GM Craig MacTavish, who played his final game in 1997.

About 73 per cent of the league’s players already wear visors, which are mandatory in Europe. The fact that some players would continue without visors didn’t sit well with at least one safety advocate.

“It’s the helmet story all over again,” said Peter Donnelly, a professor specializing in high-risk sports in the faculty of kinesiology and physical education at the University of Toronto. “There will be a few Don Cherry macho holdouts and the rest will wear visors because their wives and their mothers and their girlfriends are all telling them, ‘You’d better wear it.’

“They’re such baby steps they’re working towards trying to make this a healthy workplace. It’s really quite scary they’re so slowly moving towards what seem like very reasonable safety measures.”

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